R for roomy, not racetrack
As compact estates go, the Golf R is impressive. But it doesn’t quite deliver as a more spacious version of a hot hatch.
VW Golf R Estate Month 7
The story so far
Estate version of the hottest Mk8 Golf
★ Longer wheelbase and usefully more space for passengers and luggage than the hatch
- You don’t ever get the hang of the infotainment; dynamic engagement not quite there
Logbook
Price £45,070 (as tested £48,715) Performance 1984cc turbocharged four-cylinder, 316bhp, 4.9sec 0-62mph, 155mph E ciency 36.0mpg (ocial), 28.2mpg (tested), 178g/km C02 Energy cost
20.2p per mile Miles this
month 1704 Total miles 13,857
Ask the Golf R Estate to describe itself in five words and it’d probably say ‘hot hatch for grown-ups’. An R estate has never slipstreamed me like I’m towing it and I’ve never seen one slaloming through trac on the M25 – but then if you’re happy to pay £2375 over a hatchback for 50mm more wheelbase and 270 litres more boot space, you’re at a different life stage.
Just like me, in fact, which meant the R slotted into family life seamlessly when it arrived off the VW press fleet seven months back, already showing 7631 no doubt harder-than-average miles. Now just short of 14k, it’s leaving the CAR fleet.
There’s good and bad to report over my tenure, with the good largely relating to usefulness. The extra wheelbase was constantly helpful for ferrying my secondary schoolers and actual adults about in total comfort, while the extra payload was less frequently needed, if extremely welcome at times – it easily swallowed presents and luggage for four of us at Christmas and allowed me to make two tip runs where a hatch would’ve required four.
Its sports seats are super comfortable, it rides okay (if you slide the adaptive dampers to beyond-Comfort on the touchscreen), and 29mpg over the loan made it palatable to run given the 2.0-litre turbo four’s healthy 316bhp and the fact it wasn’t always driven with total restraint.
Then there’s 4Motion allwheel drive that shrugged off hard acceleration from junctions and brought extra safety during the snowfall in March.
It has never needed oil, nor a service given it’s on the Longlife schedule and nothing has gone wrong. All good stuff.
But… the R just doesn’t feel special enough in typical driving – I want more tingle through the steering, more tip-toesy response and a general sense that it’ll be up for it the second I am – which is a shame, because the R can be extremely rapid and involving point-topoint, you just have to drive like a lunatic to wake it up.
I was away when VW hosted a trackday at Brands Hatch, so James Dennison volunteered to take the R along to what turned out to be a sodden event.
‘In some ways the deluge played to the R’s strengths,’ he says. ‘Traction was predictably fantastic, but the all-wheel drive felt very front biased – understeer under power was easy to find, and while the rear diff would allow for oversteer if you
sent it, it wasn’t the most natural way. I was also very aware of its weight and size, which felt magnified in the wet.’
James also got some laps in the special edition Golf R 20 Years hatchback. ‘The 20 Years was much better,’ he notes. ‘More alive, more agile and just more enjoyable. I’m not wholly convinced the Golf R translates dynamically into an estate as well as it really should. It was effective, but on this evidence it’s better suited to going quick on the road rather than track.’ I suspect JD is spot-on.
Whether hatch or estate, infotainment is the other black mark, with VW’s system occasionally glitchy and always faffy – slidey heater controls that don’t illuminate at night, capacitive switches on the steering wheel with flakey haptic feedback, and madness like a stereo that stays on when you knock the car off, but steering wheel volume controls that don’t.
Make it feel more special to drive and fix the infotainment and I’d be very happy. As it is, the Mk8 R is a jack of all trades, master of some. @|amBenBarry
Count the cost Cost new £48,715. Partexchange £39,450. Cost per mile 25.5p. Cost per mile including depreciation £1.47
|’m not wholly convinced the Golf R translates dynamically into an estate as well as it should